Lyft To Uber: The Race Is On

Long before there was Uber, 21-year-old Logan Green traveled to Zimbabwe. There, he encountered impromptu fleets of vans that shuttled people around Harare’s chaotic streets. Inspired, he returned to the United States and launched a company called Zimride in 2007. It used Facebook to connect riders and drivers for long-distance trips.

John Zimmer had nothing to do with the launch of Zimride, despite the fact that it echoes his name, but when he heard about it, it resonated. Zimmer had become obsessed with the idea of ride sharing in 2006 after hearing one of his professors at Cornell give a lecture on green cities. Can you imagine, Zimmer asked a schoolmate over beers, “this future where these pods would come to your doorstep, and they’d get people around, and you wouldn’t have to drive?”

A friend introduced the two dreamers, and before long Zimmer quit his job as an analyst at Lehman Brothers to join Zimride. Their journey has been deeply intertwined with their personal lives. Green used to hitch rides from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles to visit his future wife; one of the first things Zimmer did at Zimride was persuade the woman who became his wife to join him on a cross-country trek he called Zimride Across America. The young execs have become best friends, and Green was Zimmer’s best man. Together, they pivoted from Zimride to Lyft in 2012 and introduced innovation after innovation into the ride-sharing business.

“We’ve never been closer,” Zimmer says of his relationship with Green when I meet the duo at Lyft’s San Francisco offices. (The company stopped putting fuzzy pink mustaches on its cars long ago, but the offices still boast a “Willy Wonka” conference room that one enters by climbing through a faux portrait of actor Gene Wilder in character.) But the 33-year-old Zimmer, who resembles the all-grown-up Fred Savage, from The Wonder Years, could just as well be talking about Lyft’s prospects for success.